Hey Folks:
Hope you are all having a good summer so far. Hope everyone is hanging in as best as possible.
Bad news to start off.
TEXAS FLOODS:
One of the things I lament on this blog is when something horrific happens in this country these days, such as the storm and resulting floods in South Central Texas, the finger pointing and blame starts well before the victims are all accounted for.
And man, I tried here. I'm biased, yes, guilty as charged. I can't stand Texas governor Greg Abbott, I can't stand US Senator Ted Cruz either. I wouldn't want either of these two guys representing my state.
And you know where I stand on the felon in the White House and his gang of ineptitude.
But this runs this deeper than them.
Part of the reason I'm so worked up is that I feel like we are 25 years into the current century and it seems like more often than not there has been at least one or two of these weather disasters a year. I often refer to that year's disaster and the annual storm of the century. Part of the reason I do this is to point out that if can happen it will. Because it has.
And apparently in Kerr County, TX, it happens a lot.
Per the Texas Tribune.com..
Nearly a century ago in 1932, hard rains pushed the Guadalupe River out of its banks. That destructive flooding drowned seven people and property losses exceeded $500,000 — equivalent to $11.8 million today.
In 1978, a tropical storm stalled over the headwaters of the Guadalupe and Medina Rivers. The resulting flood drowned 33 people, causing millions of dollars in property damages, ravaging roads, bridges and ranchland.
Less than a decade later, in 1987, an intense summer storm dumped about 11.5 inches of rain in mid-July near the headwaters of the Guadalupe River, sending a massive flood wave through Ingram, Kerrville and Comfort. As the wall of water rushed through a church camp near Comfort, a bus and a van attempted to evacuate campers but stalled in rapidly rising water. Ten teenagers drowned and 33 other people were injured — a tragedy that some officials alluded to in recent days when defending the lack of evacuations before the July 4 flood.
Most recently, on Memorial Day weekend in 2015, heavy rainfall upstream on the Blanco River caused flash flooding in Wimberley, uprooting centuries-old trees and damaging or destroying nearly 400 homes along its banks, displacing hundreds of residents. The river rose approximately 5 feet every 15 minutes, cresting near 50 feet. Thirteen people died in the flood.
Yes, Captain Orange, and more to the point his Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem, deserves their share of the blame for the lack of preparation and poor response to this latest disaster.
Per CNN-
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.
For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.
In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.
But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.
But it also appears from where I'm sitting that this an area prone to flooding. Us New Yorker's could be somewhat forgiven for having Super Storm Sandy creep up on us, it had been at least 75 years since a storm had done that kind of damage to our area. But at recently as 10 years ago, you had a deadly flood in that area. I'll give Orange and Noem and the rest of them all the $hit they deserve, but how were the local officials so caught off guard. And how come so little was done after the 1987 flood? CO was still bankrupting casinos back then, he was nowhere near Washington DC at that point. And FFS, 10 teenagers at a camp died in that flood.
Sound familiar?
Yes the fact that kids at a camp were swept away in this flood makes this all the more heartbreaking. Tim's a camp counselor at a day camp. Just a couple years ago he was a camper there. It hits home.
There's so much more to report on this than I have the time to write, all of it heartbreaking and aggravating. And as usual, I'm kind of at a loss for a solution. But cutting FEMA is not one of those solutions. And neither is acting shocked when it happens.
The present is too depressing. Let's flashback 40 years ago.
LIVE AID-
Editors Note- I actually wrote most of this a year ago. As I was finsihing it up, I saw a bunch of my co-workers gathering around the TV. My quiet night waxing poetic about Live Aid was over after the shooting in Baxter, PA. I filed this away and decided to run itb this year, the actual 40th anniversary.
It was 40 years ago on Sunday that Live Aid took place. walking around the city on Saturday afternoon, another hot sticky sweaty second weekend in July. It was a more overcast in NY that Saturday in 1985, but still hot and humid.
I must have either been living under a rock or just been so caught up with the Mets that year, because I don't remember hearing anything about the two concerts before that day. And I know how much planning went into putting all of it together. I just happened to turn on the TV around noon at our place in Rockaway (probably to watch Mel Allen and This Week in Baseball) and saw the stage all set up at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.
While I was trying to figure out what the hell this was all about, the show at London's Wembley Stadium was well underway. You guys are going to have to help me out here, did they broadcast the London portion on TV here? The Philadelphia part was shown on Channel 5 here in NY. Maybe MTV showed the whole thing, but we didn't have cable in Woodside, much less the bungalow in Rockaway.
When I posted about Live Aid a few years ago, a longtime friend, St. Mary's classmate and 63rd Street neighbor Tara talked about how she was down at the park at the end of our block that day and evening as guys were playing the concert on their car stereos. I remember picturing that, I was in that park all the time, I knew as well as I knew my own house. As a middle-aged guy with a couple of jobs and all sorts of responsibilities, I thought back on what Tara remembered and thought "What a great way to spend a summer Saturday."
Of course, had my folks suggested to 11-year-old me that I should go down to the park and listen to a concert from Philadelphia on some dude's car stereo that day in 1985, I would have put up quite the resistance. of that I have no doubt.
As it was, we ended up at a black party at our friend's the Reilly's in Maspeth. I happened to be in the house when Mick Jagger and Tina Turner performed Dancing in the Street, the Martha and the Vandella's hit from the 60's that Mick had recently re-made with David Bowie. I remember watching that and thinking, "Damn, they are old!" (Mick was two weeks shy of 42 and Tina was 45 at Live Aid- which now coming up on 52 for yours truly doesn't sound so old***).
We got back to Rockaway in time to see the finale in Philadelphia. Lionel Richie, Harry Belafonte and others closed the show with We Are the World. Even at that point, I had no idea what a big deal it would turn out to be.
In 2005, they did the Live 8 Concerts, and around that time, I was getting familiar with Youtube. That was the first time I saw Queen's performance at Wembley Stadium, which was brilliantly re-captured in the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. I've also watched a bunch of times Bono coming off the stage at Wembley to help a fan while the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen plow through a long ass version of Bad.
An estimated $150 million was raised between the two shows for famine relief in Ethiopia. CNN is airing a special starting Sunday night to mark the 40th anniversary.
******************************************************************************
I saw the following on Time.com
If you’re the kind of person who gets a lot done, you’re grateful for every one of the 86,400 seconds that make up a day. On July 9, however, as well as on July 22, and August 5, you won’t get your full complement of seconds. On these days the Earth will be measurably—and, so far, unaccountably— accelerating its rotation, shaving from 1.3 to 1.5 milliseconds off of the usual 24 hours the typical day gets.
That's the kind of year I'm having folks. The one day I want to be longer, my birthday, will be 1.5 milliseconds shorter. One of my dearest friends in the world celebrates her birthday on July 22nd, and she's getting screwed too. Our birthdays are on Tuesday this year, so to make up for it, I'll start celebrating on Saturday the 2nd.
Stay Safe
and Have a Great Week
**Wikipedia is unclear on this. On a chart at the bottom, it says that ABC and MTV went from 7 AM EDT till the end, while in the main part, they said ABC covered the last three hours and distributed the earlier coverage through syndication. That makes more sense, I'm positive the early Philadelphia show was on Channel 5 (pre Fox)
***Also for the fact that Mick's still on tour at 82.
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